I am super broke, and I really want to buy Aaron a Kindle for his birthday (the 17th) and Christmas. So… I am thinking about selling a bunch of my jewelry. I have a ton of stuff that I just don’t wear anymore. Some of it is stuff I’ve had forever that isn’t my style any more, and some is just stuff I am willing to part with for the sake of extra cash, especially since Evi makes wearing long earrings tough, and I don’t wear many necklaces other than my Aodin one.
So, what do you think is the best way? Ebay? Craigslist? Just pics on here with a Paypal link? I’ll be taking pictures of the stuff over the next couple of days so that I can make an album on Flickr/Facebook, but I’d love your suggestions on the best place to sell the stuff.
Filed under: Aodin, Blogotopia, Blogroll, Buddies, Get Healthy, Idiot Moments, Little Sushi, Photog, Pound Hound, Rant, Sweetpea Manatee, memorial
I’ve totally stolen this word from Miss Zoot. The other day, she posted about how she has been having a hard time lately maintaining her patience with her kids. I think this is something every parent goes through, and any parent who spends most of their day at home with their kids probably has a bigger issue than others.
This morning, I read her new post about how much better her day was when she managed to stay patient with her kids. She said that she just concentrated on taking deep breaths and, when all else failed, giving a good zerbert to the belly. There is nothing so satisfying as the deep down, belly laughs I get when I give Evi’s belly a good zerberting. Raspberrying? Whatever word you use, I’m guessing you know what I mean. I was so enamored of Zoot’s word (zerberting) that I’ve co-opted it.
Anyway, I am ashamed to admit that I sometimes lose my temper with Evi. I never yell or take it out on her, but sometimes I just get really frustrated and cranky and I frequently speak to her more harshly than I should when that happens. Then I just make myself feel worse because I feel like an idiot and a big, mean bully for getting frustrated with my seven month old. I mean really? Who’s the adult here? Oh yes, me. When I get frustrated with her I feel like the dreaded “bad mother.”
Now, for clarification, I do know that I am NOT, in fact, a bad mom. Actually, at least when I am caffeinated and relaxed, I think I do a pretty good job. But in those moments when I’ve just uttered a cranky “oh, come on” to my infant daughter, I feel like a total waste of parenting space.
So today, if I feel cranky, I will stop and zerbert a baby belly. I will NOM on her neck or hands or feet, which always makes her laugh out loud, and I will wallow in the musical sound of my daughter’s laughter instead of in my own cranky-faced weirdness. Just writing it down makes me feel calmer, more prepared for the day. Because really?
Evi goes in this morning to get her flu booster shot, and to have her head remeasured. When we were there last time, her head measurement jumped to the 90th percentile after having always been at the 50th. I am willing to bet that it is either nothing or a measuring mistake on someone’s part (though they did measure three times) but since she was coming in anyway for her flu booster, they figured it couldn’t hurt to remeasure. I am hoping they weigh her again too, so I can relax a little more about her food intake, which has admittedly improved a lot lately.
After her appointment, I will be headed to an afternoon at my friend Nicole’s house, and I am super excited to see her and her awesome boys!
Maybe when I get back I will feel prepared to tackle the big blog post about my weight, my lack of motivation to exercise, and my seeming incapability when it comes to getting back on track with weight loss….
P.S. I was just going through my tags to tag this post and I saw my “Little Sushi” tag. Sometimes it makes me so sad to think I only use it now for memorials and memories. After two plus years and a beautiful baby girl, sometimes my heart still breaks at the loss of my sweet man. You are heavy on my heart today, my sweet Aodin.
A photo of mine is in a book! Clicking on the picture will take you to the Amazon page for the book:
I am excited to be receiving a complimentary copy of the book thanks to my contribution, and I am proud to have been a part of such an exciting exploration of human emotions! I can’t wait to see the finished product. A larger image of the book page is here, and the original photo is on my Flickr here.
Filed under: Busy Bee, Celebrations, Financial Times, Friends and Family, House Frau, Italiano, Literary Genius, Married Life, Recreational Use, School Days, Sweetpea Manatee, Wishlist
Now that NaNoWriMo is over, I feel like I finally have some time to catch up on the blogging. I know it’s been sparse over here, but I’m hoping that will change. I’ve got some work to do in the coming weeks that will take some time, but hopefully I can come by a lot before the holidays to say hello and update about life.
So what’s up with me and mine?
Evi is doing really well. She had her very first fever this past week. I was nervous about it at first, but in the end she turned out just fine with some extra sleep, baby Tylenol, and lots of love. The whole thing made me realize that I am a pretty good mom if I can just relax and trust my instincts, but why is that so hard? Why can’t I just do what seems right and stop worrying about whether it matches up exactly with what the pediatrician or the magazines or parenting websites say I should be doing? I know it’s because I adore that little girl, and I am just terrified of making a decision that could give her anything less than the best.
She was so adorable when she was sick. Her Uncle Ryan was here to visit, and she was trying SO hard to smile at him even though she clearly felt awful. She’s doing great now, eating lots of solids and still showing a markedly decreased interest in her bottles. And based on the smell of formula, I SO don’t blame her. Ew!
She’s giving “kisses” now too. If you put your face right in hers and ask for a kiss, she opens her mouth and sort of licks your face. It would be gross if it weren’t the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.
We think she’s teething right now. Her drool amounts have, if possible, increased even more and she seems just a little cranky. She always wants to be chewing on something too, so Sophie and some other teethers have become her new best friends. She goes in on Thursday for her booster shot for the seasonal flu, at which point she will be fully vaccinated for that at least, and then she gets her H1N1 booster on the 14th, a full 3 days before we spend A WEEK IN FLORIDA!
We’re flying down to spend Christmas with my parents, and I am thrilled. I have so missed having them close by. Being there with them for the holidays is going to be amazing. Especially since everyone might actually be there this year. Ryan is flying down from Maryland two days after us, and even my brother Blake might be able to make it since he’ll be home for the holidays from his Army reserve MP training. I can’t wait for us all to be together. That’s what makes the holidays for me. Plus, I am excited about Evi getting to hang out with everyone for a week. It’s going to be the perfect start to the new year.
I am still working from home, thought the workload has slowed considerably and it has me worried about making ends meet through the end of the year. It stops mattering in January, when my (hopefully) triumphant return to school will mean a break from paying my student loans and, as such, relieve us of a lot of financial debt. Until then, I am looking around to see if I can take on some more home-based work to bring in some extra cash. Sometimes I really struggle with feeling guilty that my choice to stay home has put us in such a tight financial situation.
That being said, I am SO happy to be staying home. I love everything about it. I love being here for every little thing Evi does or says. I love knowing that I have a direct hand in shaping the child she is becoming. I think I could do the same even if I were working away from home, but given my personality it would be a lot harder for me. I do think I need to look for ways to build in more ME time though, because I can see how doing this long term might make it difficult for me to maintain a good sense of myself since I am always working and mothering and trying to maintain the house all at once.
I did finally manage to get out of the house to write on a Saturday morning, but I didn’t do it this past Saturday because it was my brother’s last day visiting with us before returning to college for the semester. So I missed out this week, but I am hoping to make it a fairly regular pattern, since I can go to the local library for an hour or two without spending any money or feeling like I am abandoning my family.
I am back to practicing my Italian, thanks to the awesome Italian stuff I won! I definitely let it fall by the wayside for a while there, but with these great tools I am doing much better again. I am trying to start back at the beginning and reclaim a solid grasp on the basics, so right now I am breezing through the first couple of CDs about the alphabet and simple grammar. I can tell the difficulty level is increasing, so I am hoping it won’t get too tough. I do find that learning a language via CD is much more difficult than doing so in a classroom, so I am hoping I won’t lose my motivation.
I am off to get some more work done on Book #3. I’ve been feeling really good about my writing lately, so I am hoping to see some results from it in the coming months. I don’t know what it means that there is so much talk about books falling by the wayside, but I am hoping that it’s not to late to be published. I honestly think my stuff is good, and I am hoping to find some people (other than my awesome friends… preferably people who will pay me) who agree.
I hope everyone is having a fabulous Monday. Help me get back to the blogging. Send my questions, comments, whatever you’d like to see me blog about!
Ha ha! NaNoWriMo cannot defeat me!
I was freaking out about not finishing it this year, but I got up early this morning and just really plugged through and finally finished! I don’t know if it might be cheating since instead of writing one novel I wrote the last half of one and the first half of another, but I still consider it a HUGE victory… especially since I wrote almost twenty thousand words today!!! Of course, I was up at four in the morning too so I’ve have ten hours of uninterrupted writing time, but that was because I couldn’t sleep anyway… I was restless last night.
So there. It’s done, and I feel pretty proud of it! Now I just have to get the edits back on The Traveler from a few choice people and I will send it off to an editor, and then on to agents. In the meantime, I’ll be working on book number three!
It’s possible that I wanted to share my day with you. It is also possible that documenting it like this made me feel a little better about how much I do or don’t get done in a day.
I have been saying for weeks now that I am going to start spending an hour or two alone at the library on Saturday mornings so that I can write, but I keep not going it. The truth is that I like my family so much, and I genuinely enjoy our lazy Saturday mornings, so I put it off.
This week I’ve decided to make myself go. I need the alone time, I need the time to write, and after an hour I can still come home and have a lazy morning. It’s just too important for me to reclaim some ME time, even if I don’t really feel like I want to. How do you find balance when you know you need it but you’re not sure you want it?
I am the weeeeener! I never win anything, despite a bizarre habit of entering all sorts of contests and giveaways. Lately though, I’ve had a streak of awesome luck!
First, I won a gift card to Target through MomConnect. I submitted some ideas for their Rainy Day Activity eBook, and I was chosen for the card. It was awesome, and thanks to that and the unexpected and very cool gift sent by my favorite Brandi, I should be ordering my espresso machine this week! Woo!
Then, when I checked my mail this morning, I discovered that I won the Celebrate Italian Heritage Month contest on La Bella Lingua! The Bella Lingua blog is a fantastic place to find some really great posts about Italian, in general and in specific cases. The prize package includes some awesome tools from Living Language to help me practice my Italian, a copy of the La Bella Lingua book (La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language
I am off to spend a day with an awesome mom friend, so I hope the blogoverse treats everyone well today!
I’ve officially committed to eating better, so today Aaron and I sat down and made a meal plan and shopping list for the whole week. I tried to use as much as I could from what we already had in the pantry/fridge, and then include lots of healthy stuff. It’s not perfect, and I’m sure it could be healthier, but I wanted to document it just in case it helps someone else.
We had pancakes for breakfast. For lunch, we had pastrami and cheddar melt sandwiches with horseradish and mustard and some wilted spinach with garlic. For dinner, I made zesty southern pasta and bean salad. I used fat free zesty Italian dressing, and substituted 1.5 cups of crushed tomatoes for the chopped ones. I also used radiatore instead of “seashell pasta,” and I think the shape was better for the super thin sauce. I left out the red pepper flakes because we don’t have any, but I think they would have been really good. The recipe turned out really well, and it made eight nicely sized servings, so we’ll be eating it all week!
For dessert, we had Sara Lee Cookies ‘n Cream Cheesecake Bites. Hey, no one’s perfect, and they were good! We’re trying for baby steps in the hopes that gradual changes will stick. I have to say that dinner was refreshing. It tasted like vegetables and good, healthy food, and I really liked it.
So here we go…
I’ve been in a bad mood. I’ve been cranky thanks to the uncomfortable process of drying up. I’ve been less than motivated and, as such, having trouble balancing work and life and my possibly misguided entry into this year’s NaNoWriMo.
And then I read this on Mrs. Flinger’s site.
You can click on the postcard to head to the blog where the whole story is located, but in short it is the story of a beautiful little girl whose life was cut short by a simple act, something that could easily happen to any of us.
I know what loss feels like. I know what it is to wake up without someone who ought to be there with you. I look at my sweet daughter, here and healthy and so full of life, and I choose to let go of all of the grumpy. It slips away too fast and, in some tragic times, too soon. I cannot afford to let a momentary discomfort, a worldly stress come in and put a shadow over our sweet world.
I won’t do it. I will honor every lost child by treasuring mine more every day. I am only human, but I can choose to let the grumpy go and enjoy my day with my beautiful daughter!
